Seeing that she had put out her hand, as if begging
for the truth, he added: “How can your
brother marry her—­she’s married!”

“Oh!”

“I’d no idea you didn’t know that
much.”

“We thought there was a divorce.”

The expression of which mention has been made—­that
peculiar white-hot sardonically jolly look—­visited
Courtier’s face at once. “Hoist with
their own petard! The usual thing. Let
a pretty woman live alone—­the tongues of
men will do the rest.”

“It was not so bad as that,” said Barbara
dryly; “they said she had divorced her husband.”

“You had better hear the story now. Her
father was a country parson, and a friend of my father’s;
so that I’ve known her from a child. Stephen
Lees Noel was his curate. It was a ‘snap’
marriage—­she was only twenty, and had met
hardly any men. Her father was ill and wanted
to see her settled before he died. Well, she
found out almost directly, like a good many other
people, that she’d made an utter mistake.”

Barbara came a little closer.

“What was the man like?”

“Not bad in his way, but one of those narrow,
conscientious pig-headed fellows who make the most
trying kind of husband—­bone egoistic.
A parson of that type has no chance at all.
Every mortal thing he has to do or say helps him
to develop his worst points. The wife of a man
like that’s no better than a slave. She
began to show the strain of it at last; though she’s
the sort who goes on till she snaps. It took
him four years to realize. Then, the question
was, what were they to do? He’s a very
High Churchman, with all their feeling about marriage;
but luckily his pride was wounded. Anyway, they
separated two years ago; and there she is, left high
and dry. People say it was her fault. She
ought to have known her own mind—­at twenty!
She ought to have held on and hidden it up somehow.
Confound their thick-skinned charitable souls, what
do they know of how a sensitive woman suffers?
Forgive me, Lady Barbara—­I get hot over
this.” He was silent; then seeing her eyes
fixed on him, went on: “Her mother died
when she was born, her father soon after her marriage.
She’s enough money of her own, luckily, to live
on quietly. As for him, he changed his parish
and runs one somewhere in the Midlands. One’s
sorry for the poor devil, too, of course! They
never see each other; and, so far as I know, they
don’t correspond. That, Lady Barbara, is
the simple history.”

Barbara, said, “Thank you,” and turned
away; and he heard her mutter:
“What a shame!”

But he could not tell whether it was Mrs. Noel’s
fate, or the husband’s fate, or the thought
of Miltoun that had moved her to those words.